daughter

English

Etymology

From Middle English doughter, doghter, from Old English dohtor (“daughter”), from Proto-West Germanic *dohter, from Proto-Germanic *duhtēr, from Proto-Indo-European *dʰugh₂tḗr.

Pronunciation

• (Received Pronunciation) enPR: dôʹtər, IPA^(key): /ˈdɔːtə(ɹ)/

• Audio (UK)

  (file)

• (General American) enPR: dô'tər, IPA^(key): /ˈdɔ.tɚ/, /ˈdɔ.t̬ɚ/,
• (General American, cot–caught merger, Canada) enPR: dä'tər, IPA^(key): /ˈdɑ.tɚ/,

• Audio (US)

  (file)

• (General Australian) enPR: dô'tŭ, IPA^(key): /ˈdoːtɐ/
• Homophone: dotter (in accents with the cot-caught merger)
• Hyphenation: daugh‧ter
• Rhymes: -ɔːtə(ɹ)

Noun

daughter (plural daughters or (archaic) daughtren)

1. One’s female offspring.

   Synonym: girl

   I already have a son, so I would like to have a daughter.

   • 1611, The Holy Bible,  (King James Version), London: Robert Barker, , →OCLC, Leviticus 26:29, column 1:

     And ye ſhal eate the fleſh of your ſonnes, and the fleſh of your daughters ſhall ye eate.

2. A female descendant.

   Antonym: son

   • 1950 October, C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (fiction):

     Daughter of Eve from the far land of Spare Oom where eternal summer reigns around the bright city of War Drobe, how would it be if you came and had tea with me?

3. A daughter language.
4. (physics) A nuclide left over from radioactive decay.
5. (syntax, of a parse tree) A descendant.
   • 2013, Daniela Isac, Charles Reiss, “Chapter 7, Some details of sentence structure”, in I-Language: An Introduction to Linguistics as Cognitive Science, 2nd edition, Oxford University Press, →ISBN, page 163:

     We have distinguished two types of situations from the point of view of the placement of the obligatory X constituent within the phrase XP: one in which X is a daughter of XP, and one in which X is not a daughter of XP, but a daughter of one of the constituents of XP (in an adjunct configuration).

   • 2017, Yicheng Wu, “Chapter 2, The dynamics of language processing”, in The Interfaces of Chinese Syntax with Semantics and Pragmatics, Taylor & Francis, →ISBN, page 17:

     Following the conventional pattern, the argument daughter of a node is assigned the index n0 and placed on the left side, and the functor daughter, the index n1, is placed on the right side.

6. (by extension) A female character of a creator.
7. (informal, uncommon, sometimes derogatory) A familiar address to a female person from an older or otherwise more authoritative person.

Alternative forms

• dafter (obsolete)

Antonyms

• (with regard to gender) son
• (with regard to ancestry) mother, father, parent

Hypernyms

• child

Derived terms

Descendants

• Kriol: doda

Translations

See also

• aunt, uncle
• brother, sister
• cousin

Further reading

• daughter on Wikipedia.Wikipedia

Anagrams

• guardeth